I'm really glad calyxos is starting up again. Grapheneos has a lot of cool technical implementation but there are a lot of things that Calyx seems to do in a simpler, more vanilla Android manner.
Not sure where you got Calyx doing stuff in a "simpler, more vanilla Android manner". It's quite the opposite, actually. CalyxOS bundles a whole bunch of useless third party apps which connect to third party services. If you opt-in to installing microG (which is privileged, not in a sandbox), you aren't avoiding Google in the slightest. You're actually opening yourself up more because of how much of a sloppy interpretation microG is while trying to fill in the role of Google Play services. microG exposed location data to apps, even if the permission was explicitly denied. The developers knew about this for years without doing anything about it.
You're safer using a standard Android phone than using an OS as duct-taped together as CalyxOS.
microG exposed location data to apps, even if the permission was explicitly denied. The developers knew about this for years without doing anything about it.
GrapheneOS is more simple and vanilla than CalyxOS. GrapheneOS puts substantial effort into seamless/passive privacy and security features, as well as maintaining feature parity with the Android Open Source Project and with Googles stock Pixel operating system.
CalyxOS is not a private or secure operating system. They have added several 3rd party apps and services, which includes several 3rd party connections. On top of this, several of these services are given problematic, privileged access.
A notable example of this is Android Auto. CalyxOS grants substantial privileged access to this component by default, while GrapheneOS sandboxes it, and exposes 4 opt-in toggles for privileged access. The user may granularly decide what privileged access they wish to grant.
Not using it currently but they recently released some test builds of android 16. And yeah aiui bootloader relocking is supported for devices that are compatible.
They released the _test builds_.... now, almost a year since the release, while the beta of Android 17 was released 3 months ago. Right, CalyxOS says that releases are paused so presumably the work is slow.
The problem with lagging is that only some of the security patches are backported to older androids, so the project would have to backport remaining ones themselves. Let's be real, no one does that in CalyxOS for all the supported devices.
Out of their 15 supported "modern devices" 10 are pixels.
Their extended support phones (6 devices) has three pixels as well. Might as well get more modern and secure OS instead (A16 with fixes and working call recording for example) :)
You're safer using a standard Android phone than using an OS as duct-taped together as CalyxOS.